With summer around the corner, it’s perfectly trendy to wear custom straw hats with flirty summer dresses. Straw is also hot on the catwalk at present with stars like Emily Ratajowski wearing straw boater hats and Bella Hadid sporting woven berets. Even reality stars like Kendall Jenner have jumped on to the trend with straw boater hats. However, these are so many different hat styles that choosing a style is tough. Here are a few tips to help you out.
Skin color — Neutral colors like beige, sand, grey, black, and white look great on almost all skin tones. To make the hat pop or match with your outfit for the day, we recommend investing in colored bands, brooches, or hat pins. Other than neutral colors, you can also wear vibrant colors as they go well with tanned skin tones. Neutral tones match nearly every skin color.
Body shape — Choose a hat that is proportional to your body. Tall crowns can lengthen the body while wide-brimmed caps can make you look shorter.
Face shape — Generally, oval faces can wear any kind of hat size or shape. Round faces should choose wide-brimmed hats with a downturned or upturned brim. Like oval faces, heart faces can wear any kind of hard shape or size. However, this face structure does not do well with wide brims. Square faces do well with soft unstructured hats with no angles or lines.
Material — Raffia or straw is the material of choice at present. Traditionally, materials like wheat straw, rye straw, toquilla straw, braided hemp, and Shantung straw were used to make traditional straw hats. However, hatmakers have started using unique materials like Washi paper, seagrass, sisal, visca straw, rush straw, and synthetic colored straw to create trendy styles.
Styles — The good news is that milliners can now create nearly every style with straw. Fedoras as the most popular style available for women. The soft-brimmed style suits most body types and works well with feminine elements as well. Panama hats resemble fedora’s but they have a higher crown and are perfect for summer. Trilby hats are just like fedora’s but have a small brim and sit neatly on the head. They also look much more trendy and seem to suit nearly every body type.
As you can see, the choices are endless. Pick a color and style that you like or ask your milliner to design custom straw hats for yourself, and you are good to go.